The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [22]
Melissa, a truly awesome mom and baker we know, makes bread five days a week. On four of them, she starts when she gets home from work at three-thirty, lets the dough rise during dinner, shapes the loaves and bakes them late in the evening. The day she loves is her full day at home, when she can work along with the children to prepare Flemish Desem, the bread her family likes best, and one that has the long rising periods that allow everybody to fit their other activities around it.
Whatever the undenied challenges, surely it is true that having children to bake for—and with—makes it all the more worthwhile. For one thing, you can be sure that your child’s daily bread is wholesome and nutritious—not a small thing. But beyond that, the fact that you care to take the trouble to bake their bread instead of buying it is an expression of love that doesn’t go unnoticed, however silent the appreciation may be.
In fact, whether or not there are children to share the fun, and even when the loaves emerge from a really ripsnorting schedule, what seems to happen to a lot of people is that over time they draw more and more satisfaction from their bread-making. As its importance in their lives increases, some competing activities can begin to seem less necessary. Slowly, priorities reorder themselves, and your determination to make your own bread even on a tight schedule becomes a steady impetus that leads naturally and mysteriously to a more home-centered and tranquil life.
A Practical Consideration
For more about yeast and its ways see this page; for specifics about varying timings, see this page.
People with demanding schedules often ask us to give recipes that make bread really fast. This is not impossible, but there are other options that may be even easier, and better, too. The thing to remember is that whether you follow a recipe that takes three hours or twelve or twenty-four, the actual time you put into it—mixing, kneading, shaping—is the same; and that is only about a half an hour (or even less if you enlist mechanical help). Most of the work is done by the yeast while you do other things, and if you make a longer-rising bread, you’ll find the dough is more tolerant when your timing is a little off.
The majority of recipes in this book call for warm risings that get the bread into the oven in about four hours. On that schedule, half a day a week, or twice a week, provides bread conveniently for most families. Bread made this way rises high, has good flavor, and has reasonable keeping quality. But if you prefer, you can make these same breads on a more leisurely schedule, giving the dough a total of six or seven hours to rise at room temperature instead of warmer. The slower pace gives your loaves extra goodness, and gives you extra leeway.
Or if you want, you can opt to speed up the whole process so that you have your bread into the oven in less than three hours. Such loaves don’t have the quality of longer-rising bread, but they taste good and rise very high.
To combine some of the benefits of both a long rise and a fast one, part of the dough can be mixed ahead of time; this is called the “sponge method”; the how-tos are given. Sponges offer a lot of flexibility because they do not require the same careful timing that normal, straight doughs do.
You can make good bread on many different schedules. The skill comes in adjusting the amount of yeast and the dough’s rising temperature so that both the yeast’s activity and the elasticity of the dough will reach their peak when you are ready to form the loaves. Dough in this prime condition is not a matter of chance but is at your command; bakers call it “ripe dough,” and whatever timing or ingredients go into making it, the result is excellent bread.
In the pages that follow are recipes with scheduling patterns that work. If you don’t find one that suits you, refer to the section beginning for an overview of many other possibilities with specific suggestions